Reports that Sussex Police failed to record more than 20,000 crimes in a year have been branded ‘alarmist’ and ‘wrong’ by the Police & Crime Commissioner.
Katie Bourne spoke during a meeting of the Police & Crime Panel on Friday (June 30).
Her comments followed a report from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) which rated the force ‘inadequate’ for its recording of data about crime and said that 20,200 crimes had gone unrecorded in 2021/22.
Mrs Bourne said:
“I was really concerned about the headline that they went out with – with 20,000 crimes not being recorded.
“It was alarmist and, I thought, wrong of the inspectorate, quite frankly.
“I and my colleagues have written and expressed our deep concerns around some of the language and the intemperate language that was used.
“The chief inspector is probably not happy but I felt it needed to be said.”
Mrs Bourne told the Panel that HMIC had looked at 579 crimes, of which 471 ‘didn’t look like they’d been recorded correctly’ – though she said the figure was actually only 11.
She added:
“In the over-all, when you look at how many crimes get recorded into Sussex Police in a year, for them to take a small sample and extrapolate it up and come up with a number of 20,000 I thought was unnecessary and inflammatory. Deliberately so.”
Sussex was the last force to be inspected for crime data integrity before the Home Office changed the rules when it came to recording crime.
Previously, an initial crime report for a ‘principle offence’ had to be drawn up followed by any secondary reports for crimes called in which were linked to the first.
Now all incidents are recorded under the one ‘principal offence’, rather than as multiple entries on a database that effectively re-records the same incident.
Mrs Bourne said:
“Had we been judged six months ago under these new changes, we would have got at the very least a ‘good’ and probably an ‘outstanding’ on our crime recording.”
Despite her obvious frustration with the outcome for Sussex Police, she acknowledged that the inspectorate was one of the ‘tools in my armoury of scrutiny and accountability’ and that inspections were important.
But she felt that not enough focus was being aimed at the positive findings.
For example, the force was rated ‘good’ for its work preventing crime and anti-social behaviour and for engaging with and treating the public with fairness and respect.
Mrs Bourne added:
“There is a lot of good in that report as well.
“It’s very easy in a scrutiny meeting to play critic too much. I think it’s also very important that we look at the areas where the force are doing well and give them credit for that.
“To get a ‘good’ in this current climate is very, very difficult, so I think they did extraordinarily well in those areas where they got ‘good’.”
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